Flipkart voice assistant: E-commerce major Flipkart today announced the launch of its new voice assistant that will be available on its grocery store Supermart to enable consumers to buy products easily using voice commands in multiple languages, starting with Hindi and English.
A common practice it has been to call the nearby kiranawala to list out the grocery items you need to purchase. To replicate this natural behavior for users in the online world, the e-commerce marketplace Flipkart has launched voice assistants on its platform to allow users to discover and buy the products they like.
The consumers can speak to the voice assistant in English and Hindi to purchase the products. Currently, the service is available only for Flipkart’s grocery store, Supermart.
The voice-first conversational AI platform has been built by Flipkart’s in-house technology team with solutions for Speech Recognition, Natural Language Understanding, Machine Translation, and Text to Speech for Indian languages, the Walmart-owned company said in a statement.
These solutions are capable of understanding vernacular languages such as Hindi, e-commerce categories and products, and tasks such as searching for a product, understanding product details, placing an order, etc. The indigenously developed AI platform is built to automatically detect the language spoken by the user, and in real-time transcribe, translate, transliterate and understand the user’s intent to have engaging shopping-related conversations in various Indian languages.
“While we have seen great adoption for our video and vernacular offerings, the next step in that direction is to solve for the voice capability for e-commerce,” said Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Flipkart. He further added, “The launch of Voice Assistant also aligns well with the growing adoption and comfort of consumers towards voice-based online commerce.”
